If Reporters Ignore Reality, Of Course We Can’t Trust Them To Report On It
By Mary Rooke, Daily Caller News Foundation | April 10, 2025
President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, reportedly refused to respond to New York Times reporters who included their “preferred pronouns” in their email signatures. Leavitt said it’s a Trump administration policy to ignore questions from reporters who deny “biological reality.”
“As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios,” Leavitt told the New York Times’s Michael Grynbaum in an email. “Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story.”
Considering the way the media class covered Trump over the last decade, it seems like common sense to avoid so-called reporters who so plainly expose their left-wing bias. These people are not grounded in reality and, therefore, cannot be trusted to report the facts to the American people.
Still, this should be a policy for all Americans, not just the Trump administration. While they claim to report the news with no left-leaning slant, putting pronouns in their bio exposes their bias in the most obvious way.
The Washington Post reporter Karine Elwood is an excellent example of this. She wrote a profile on April 3 about a trans-identified male, Eliza Munshi, who is “forced” to compete in track events on the male team. Elwood framed the story purposefully to push the reader to empathize with the boy despite overwhelming evidence that male athletes have a clear advantage over female athletes. Additionally, female athletes have been seriously harmed by male athletes during competitions.
Despite this and polling that shows an overwhelming majority of Americans do not support males playing on female sports teams, Elwood defies reality choosing to instead take the reader on a journey through fantasyland.
In her piece, Elwood used feminine pronouns and even included a description of the boy’s pink hair. To drive her point home, Elwood wrote: “Eliza couldn’t help but think that if more people saw trans girls like her, they might think differently.”
That’s the whole point of her story. While Elwood may claim that she is merely covering a Virginia story, as the state’s education reporter for the outlet, what she really wants is to change Americans’ perceptions of so-called trans-athletes. The evidence for this can be found in her public social media profiles, like her Instagram page. Elwood’s bio proudly includes her “preferred pronouns,” she/her. Similar to the black square posted during the Black Lives Matter riots, adding pronouns next to your name, whether on social media or email, allows the viewer a chance to basque in your social justice glow.
While it’s clearly a performative gesture meant to highlight your self-importance, the act of adding pronouns to your bio also exposes you’ve lost your grip on reality. Having to declare your pronouns shows you don’t understand biology. You can either be XX or XY. No matter how many hormones or surgeries a human receives, their biological makeup will remain the same.
But this isn’t just a problem at The Washington Post. All leftist media suffers from a credibility issue. How can readers trust reporters who refuse to acknowledge basic facts? They can’t, which is why the media class has such a dismal approval rating.
The most important part of a reporter’s responsibilities is getting the facts of the story correct. The truth is that men can never become women and vice versa. Any reporter who willingly chooses to use pronouns in the bio should immediately be discounted as a fraud and their work ignored.
Mary Rooke is a commentary and analysis writer at the Daily Caller News Foundation
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